


Grab bag notes on Glee, gender, and queerness

by CyanoFal



Category: Glee
Genre: Archived from cyanoticfallacy blog, Gender, Meta, Meta Essay, Nonfiction, Sue Sylvester Shuffle, Zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-14 23:17:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16922313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanoFal/pseuds/CyanoFal
Summary: Some mixed notes on Glee's subversive potential in relationship to its presentations of femininity.





	1. "Thriller/Heads Will Roll" and gendered spaces

**Author's Note:**

> First chapter originally posted June 2, 2017 on cyanoticfallacy blog. This post was made originally as a response to black-john-lennon's episode ranking.

"Brittany: The glee club together with the football team, it’s like a double rainbow. A zombie double rainbow."

~

Brittany’s quote about rainbows and zombies is really interesting to me since I’m studying Glee’s applications of queer theory, and I was thinking a lot about football as a masculine space in comparison to theatre as a feminine space. There’s articles about zombies being coded as metaphors for queer anxieties in media since you have this figure that’s made monstrous in body and in its consumption of other bodies, and it’s especially relevant in zombies’ associations with death and queerness serving as the death drive to societal norms. Then you have this episode where the football team performs musical numbers wearing zombie make-up as a kind of drag, the girls invade this traditionally male space, and the masculine football team performs in the half-time show in full zombie costumes. There’s this blurring of gender roles throughout the episode, but then this blurring is subverted through the football team’s use of zombie make-up to intimidate the opposing team after relegating the girls back to being cheerleaders, assimilating the costume and performance’s use from feminine back to masculine. The masculine space of the football field is protected, the feminine space of performance is briefly utilized in coalition to advance a goal but then put back in its queer space at the bottom of the high school pyramid too.


	2. Valuing Kurt's femininity in Acafellas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Defending Kurt's femininity in response to an episode ranking. A note about how Kurt's bravery in Acafellas is directly tied to how he endures the dangers associated with his feminine presentation. - Originally posted June 2, 2017 on cyanoticfallacy blog.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted as a response to 47mel47's episode ranking. This is the quote I'm responding to, but please keep in mind that posting it here is taking it out of context: 
> 
> "So, even though the episode was trying to tell us that being a man is all about confidence, true confidence was demonstrated by two female characters, and a male not considered ‘masculine’ at this point of the narrative, by the writers and other characters (which we all know is bullshit, of course)." 
> 
> My point is more that the episode is trying to present femininity, including male femininity, as a positive influence, and Kurt doesn't need to be considered masculine to be a valuable character.

I love the analysis of manhood and guts being contradicted by femininity, and I wanted to point out one thing. Masculinity isn’t the same as maleness in terms of gender identity. It’s just a description of traits. Many men have feminine qualities just as many women have masculine qualities. Kurt is a feminine boy in season 1 and there is nothing wrong with that. He is most confident in season 1 when he celebrates his femininity and female role models than when he performs masculinity (the Single Ladies dance, Defying Gravity, those knee-length sweaters versus Pink Houses and the flannel). Kurt’s femininity now is important, and he doesn’t need to be masculine to still be talented, brave, funny, or lovable. He does develop masculine qualities throughout the course of the show, but I don’t understand why it’s a problem for him to be considered feminine when that’s something he embraces. (Le Jazz Hot even explicitly has him talk about embracing both the masculine and feminine qualities in a person.)

I’m only bringing this up here because of the one line in the post, not because I’m trying to pick on anyone in the thread. There’s just a difference between being male (gender) and being masculine (traits reified by society), and the reason Kurt was such a stand-out character was because he was a boy that was unabashedly feminine in spite of all the threats against him. This is why queer boys are picked on in middle school or even degraded or cast aside in adulthood, because they perform femininity instead of masculinity. Teasing the boy with the high voice or putting “no fems” on a dating profile stems from devaluing feminine qualities. Kurt’s bravery in this episode does in fact come from his growing confidence in his femininity, and that subverts the concept that manhood and masculinity are what we should all aspire to be without question. Kurt gives room for the ambiguities.


End file.
